Staff Research Scientist

ServiceNow • Santa Clara, CA

1d

About The Position

ServiceNow AI Research is focused on building the future of enterprise agentic AI, using insights from how agents behave in complex enterprise environments and at scale. The Staff Research Scientist will contribute to research on how agents accumulate and reuse tacit knowledge, learn and improve continuously, and maintain resilience, safety, and privacy. The role addresses challenges that affect real-world enterprise adoption, including safety mechanisms, threat detection, privacy guarantees, and responsible AI practices. The researcher will have the opportunity to publish and advance the state of the art, while testing research hypotheses against real deployments.

Requirements

• PhD in computer science, machine learning, or a related field, or equivalent research experience.
• At least 2 years of research experience post-PhD, with a significant portion in an industrial setting or in direct contact with deployed systems.
• Established publication record at top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, or EMNLP, or equivalents, with contributions recognized as influential in the field.
• Demonstrated ability to set and execute a research agenda, including selecting important problems before they become widely recognized.
• Experience working on cross-disciplinary teams or projects with researchers and engineers.
• Strong software development skills, including writing, maintaining, and optimizing high-quality research code and preparing results for production.
• Advanced use of agentic tools in research practice and willingness to advance the team's practices in this area.
• Ability to influence technical decisions beyond one's own team, particularly with product and engineering teams.
• Excellent communication skills, including explaining complex technical work to non-specialist audiences and executives.

Nice To Haves

• Expertise in one or more of agent memory and tacit knowledge, continual learning, safety and alignment, security and threat detection, privacy, or agent evaluation.
• Experience with AI systems operating in real enterprise environments and their compliance, governance, and scale constraints.
• Contributions to open-source software, datasets, or evaluation benchmarks used by the community.
• Scientific service roles such as program committee participation, editorial work, or workshop organization.
• Academic collaborations or supervision of doctoral students.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to research initiatives on agent memory and tacit knowledge, continual learning, resilience, safety, and privacy.
• Set and execute a research agenda, identifying important problems and explaining their significance.
• Develop, maintain, and optimize high-quality research software, supporting the transition of research results into production.
• Collaborate with researchers, engineers, product teams, and engineering teams.
• Use agentic tools in research practice and help advance the team's practices in this area.
• Influence technical decisions beyond the research team.
• Communicate complex technical work to non-specialist audiences and executives.
• Publish research and test hypotheses against real deployments.

Benefits

• Equity, when applicable.
• Variable or incentive compensation.
• Health plans.
• Flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP).
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time away plan.
• Family leave programs.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree